1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic device, and particularly to an electronic device provided with an information processing function.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, electronic devices such as portable game devices, PDA's (Personal Digital Assistant), and the like are widely used. In recent years, multifunctional electronic devices such as, e.g., smartphones have been introduced in which functions of portable phones, PDA's, and the like are put together into one. Such electronic devices are provided with a large-capacity memory and a high-speed processor, and the user can enjoy various applications by downloading content such as game software, music, movies, and the like.
Electronic devices having touch panels provide an excellent user interface that allows the user to perform an intuitive operation. For example, user interfaces and the like are already in practical use that allow a displayed content image (icon) to be tapped using a finger so as to select the icon or that allow a display image to be scrolled by tracing the surface of a panel using a finger.
An electronic device having a touch panel usually provides one type of user interface for a single process. With regard to a scrolling process, a user interface is already in practical use that allows the surface of a panel to be traced using a finger in a direction in which the user wishes to move a display image. Thus, an electronic device provides such a user interface to the user while being equipped with the user interface. However, when many icons are to be displayed, a scrolling process must be repeated until a target icon is displayed, and it sometimes takes time. In particular, there is a fact that the number of icons to be displayed is growing since large-capacity memories allow electronic devices to store many items of content.
The inventors of the present invention have conceived of a possibility of achieving an efficient scrolling operation by providing several different types of user interfaces with different amounts of scrolling. In that case, the same scrolling display may be provided for all the types of user interfaces. However, in order for the user to efficiently search for a target icon, it is preferred to provide, based on the difference in the amount of scrolling, scrolling display with visibility devised for each type of user interface.
An electronic device of recent years has a wireless communication function and is provided with a large-capacity memory that allows for the downloading of various items of content to the memory after accessing an external content server. Therefore, an electronic device is preferably capable of searching for content stored in a server or content downloaded in a memory efficiently. Also, an electronic device is capable of effectively presenting search results to the user, preferably.